Host profiles are a vSphere Enterprise Plus feature that can greatly simplify the host configuration management required as your deployment scales out, by using configuration policies. Host profile policies can be used to eliminate per-host manual configuration, and to maintain configuration consistency across the entire datacenter. Host profiles are essentially blueprints or templates of known, validated gold ESXi configurations. These can be used to manage settings and monitor compliance for networking, storage, security, and other configurations for multiple ESXi hosts. Host profiles can be managed using the vSphere Web Client, PowerCLI, or vSphere APIs.
The workflow for host profiles starts with the reference host. A reference host acts as the template from which the host profile is referenced and created. The process would go as follows:
Install ESXi and configure the reference host.
Create a host profile from reference host.
Modify host profile...